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The general theory of relativity began with a sudden thought. It was late 1907, two years after the “miracle year” in which Albert Einstein had produced his special theory of relativity and his theory of light quanta, but he was still an examiner in the Swiss patent office. The physics world had not yet caught up with his genius. While sitting in his office in Bern, a thought “startled” him, he recalled: “If a person falls freely, he will not feel his own weight....

Originally posted on the Nature news blog When deciding whether a defendant is too intellectually disabled to receive the death penalty, courts must take into account inherent variability in IQ scores, the US Supreme Court ruled today. In its 5-4 decision, the court said that it is unconstitutional for states like Florida to use an IQ score of 70 as a cutoff above which a defendant is considered to be intelligent enough to understand the consequences of his or her actions....

For 15 years British insurers have agreed not to use information about a prospective policyholder’s genes to determine eligibility for certain life insurance policies. The moratorium has one critical exception. An underwriter can take into account when writing some policies whether a person carries the gene for the malady once known as chronic hereditary chorea and now simply Huntington’s disease. Becoming aware of a positive gene test lets insurers know that, in the continuing absence of any intervention, the applicant’s cause of death will likely be Huntington’s—knowledge that comes with far greater certainty than other factors they typically consider, such as smoking, drinking or riding a motorcycle....

BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO I am a psychologist who used two online dating services and found nearly every flaw depicted in the article “The Truth about Online Dating,” by Robert Epstein. I was especially put off by the assertion by one company that I was “not compatible” with certain ladies I wanted to meet and yet “compatible” with others who had one of the limiting characteristics I had listed at the company’s suggestion....

Fluoride Findings A report by the National Research Council (NRC) is cited as suggesting negative effects of fluoride in “Second Thoughts about Fluoride,” by Dan Fagin. But the NRC notes that its report was not initiated because of concerns about the low levels of fluoride used in community water fluoridation, nor did it examine that issue. Instead the report is part of a routine review by the Environmental Protection Agency to address whether the higher levels of naturally occurring fluoride currently allowed in drinking water pose a health risk....

“I would be the first patient!” exclaimed the Dalai Lama before 14,000 neuroscientists who flocked to hear him speak at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting in November 2005 in Washington, D.C. The Buddhist spiritual leader’s promise followed his comment that hospitals not only should aid the mentally ill but also should provide mind-altering brain surgery and drugs to control anger, hate or jealousy in everyday people. He added—only half-jokingly—that if a small electrical jolt to his brain could free him of negative emotion, he would have no need to spend hours meditating each day to reach a trouble-free state of mind....

The two most common ways of generating power from the sun both have their drawbacks. Photovoltaic cells, which absorb photons from sunlight and convert them to electricity, operate with only 20 percent efficiency. That is because they can use only photons within a certain range of wavelengths to excite electrons. Solar-thermal systems, which turn sunlight into heat and then into electricity, are more efficient than photovoltaics—because they can use the entire solar spectrum, they can reach efficiencies of 30 percent—but they are impossible to scale down to rooftop size....

Conservation biologist David S. Wilcove was on a birding trip to the Indonesian island of Sumatra in 2012, when he began to notice that house after house in every village he visited had cages hanging outside, inhabited by the kinds of wild birds he had expected to see in the forest. One in five households in Indonesia keeps birds as pets. That got him thinking, “What is this doing to the birds?...

Climate news that’s come down the line: a draft report, congressional shenanigans, apples, carbon overload, and 2013 claiming sixth place. If you follow climate science in the media, you no doubt know by now that a draft of the summary report of the fifth assessment of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was leaked earlier this week. (See here, here, here and here.) Key conclusions, especially those that point to greater certainty about human-influences of climate change and the consequences of same, are being reported on and discussed....

The current famine in Niger, brought on by one of the worst droughts in the country’s history, has left millions of people facing starvation. The results of a new study bolster the theory that the effects of such a famine will be even more far-reaching than is initially apparent. According to a report published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, children born during a food crisis have an increased risk of developing schizophrenia later in life....

THE TEN MOST BEAUTIFUL ­EXPERIMENTS by George Johnson. Knopf, 2008 As a science writer, Johnson confesses, he has often been attracted to rarefied concepts such as general relativity or quantum mechanics. Fascinating stuff, but he began to feel the need for something more basic. “What I was looking for were those rare moments when, using the materials at hand, a curious soul figured out a way to pose a question to the universe and persisted until it replied....

CAN WE CHOOSE our sexual orientation? Given the polarized nature of the discussion among national leaders, it would be logical to think that the publics opinions must be equally divided. On the one hand, religious conservatives argue that being homosexual is a choice. On the other, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and at least a few experts counter that sexual orientation is immutable, something that we are born with....

One of the most mind-bending revelations of quantum physics over the past century has been that properties of particles are possibly not real until they are measured. Now a thought experiment suggests that conclusion may be too tame: it seems that particles’ properties—their spin, for instance—may not even belong to them. This possibility is akin to saying that your personality does not belong to you. The study claims to demonstrate this paradoxical disconnect between particles and their properties via a version of the so-called quantum Cheshire cat experiment....

Key concepts Chemistry Gels Molecules Solutions Introduction Have you ever wondered how gels are made? You probably have several kinds of products around your house—some that you eat—that use gels: puddings, diapers, shoe insoles, packaging, ice cream, toothpaste and many more. A gel is a mixture of solid particles suspended in liquid. The solid particles in the gel can absorb water, causing the gel to swell and increase in volume. If you ever dunked a diaper in a tub of water, you have seen this in action; the diaper will swell as it absorbs the water, and if you cut the diaper open you will see the pieces of gel that are absorbing the water....

At dawn on a summer morning in 2012, we were on our third round of espresso when the video link connected our office at the California Institute of Technology to the CERN laboratory near Geneva. On the monitor we saw our colleagues on the Razor team, one of many groups of physicists analyzing data from the CMS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Razor was created to search for exotic collisions that would provide the first evidence of supersymmetry, a 45-year-old theory of matter that would supplant the standard understanding of particle physics, solving deep problems in physics and explaining the nature of the universe’s mysterious dark matter....

Editor’s Note: This story, originally printed in the January 2008 issue of Scientific American, is being posted in light of two new studies showing that angiogenesis inhibitors, discussed in this article, may actually make tumors bigger, not smaller. While still a graduate student in 1974, I had a chance to see malignant tumors from a most unusual perspective. I was working at the National Cancer Institute in the laboratory of the late Pietro M....

The era of U.S. coal-fired electric power generation will effectively end as new federal regulations limiting carbon dioxide emissions from fossil plants take effect, a new analysis from Bloomberg Government concludes. The report, from energy analyst Rob Barnett, posits that the new U.S. EPA rule, rolled out last month and open for public comment until June 12, will effectively ban the construction of new coal-fired power plants because the CO2 emission rates required of fossil plants are so strenuous that no conventional coal plant could meet them....

Dear EarthTalk: With plug-in hybrid and electric cars due to hit the roads sometime soon, will there be places to plug them in besides at home? And if so, how much will it cost to re-charge? – Nicole Koslowsky, Pompano Beach, FL Gasoline-electric hybrids, like the Toyota Prius, are all the rage due to their fuel efficiency, and consumers have been clamoring for carmakers to up the ante and give these vehicles a plug....

They call it ebu gogo, the grandmother who eats anything. Scientists best guess was that macaque monkeys inspired the ebu gogo lore. But in October 2004 an alluring alternative came to light. A team of Australian and Indonesian researchers excavating a cave on Flores unveiled the remains of a lilliputian human–one that stood barely a meter tall–whose kind lived as recently as 12,000 years ago. The announcement electrified the paleoanthropology community....

SHANGHAI – The world’s biggest coal consumer now has a new incentive to take a cleaner energy path, as China’s coal-fired power plants are drying up the country’s already scarce water resources. A report published today by Bloomberg New Energy Finance notes that the top five Chinese power generators – China Huaneng Group, China Datang Corp., China Huadian Corp., China Guodian Corp. and China Power Investment Corp. – have hundreds of gigawatts of coal-fired power plants in the country’s dry north and that retrofitting them with water-efficient solutions could cost billions of dollars....